As someone who lives for both poetry and Iris Murdoch (her own canon and the wonderful world of scholarship that surrounds her), Poems from an Attic, is the best fiftieth birthday present I could wish for. I’ve interrupted my project of reading fifty books published in 1975 (my own vintage) to splash around in the joy of this lyrical cornucopia.
Iris Murdoch, the great Anglo-Irish Platonist philosopher and novelist of the twentieth century reassesses Irish themes and settings from a Platonic perspective in her novel The Unicorn (1963). The novel unfolds a complex and ambiguous relationship between Platonism and Ireland as a setting.
I looked out Under the Net from our bookcase and found a lovely old Penguin with Margaret Foreman’s beautiful painting of Jake in his chair. I was captivated again and found we had The Bell, The Nice and the Good and about four or five more. I had to read all of them and then, being something of a completist, had to read the rest of the novels, most of which I had never heard of or seen in print.